The Hip Housewife has a bit of a freakout

I've been actually cooking at school!  This is super exciting.  We get to eat what we cook and taste each other's stuff after we get the comments from our instructor.  I'm getting consistent "Well cooked, needs a little more seasoning.  But good."  I'm usually able to tell my instructor what I need to correct before she tells me.  When I hear her giving feedback I'll try listen and take a look at what she's talking about.

Today, I had a quiet little freakout in class.  Part of my program is completing 200 hours of externship in a commercial kitchen by March.  This equals out to about 10 hours a week, not totally un-doable but I have to find the place.  I'm pretty sure I have one in the bag, a bakery near my house.  The owner is also a mom who is running a niche establishment where she does one thing well instead of trying to do too much and sacrificing quality.

One of my classmates told me that she heard from another student that the culinary students couldn't complete their hours at a bakery.  I knew not to take that as gospel and decided I needed to heel-and-toe it over to career services to find out for sure.  But, I had myself a private little moment where I said to myself "Oh dear lord.  My resume needs serious work.  It's a big portion of my grade.  How the hell am I going to do this?  I'm forty fucking years old.  What the hell am I thinking?  This was a dumb idea.  Maybe I should drop out."  All that bullshit.

One thing I need to be very, very careful of is not self-sabotaging myself.  Not practicing, sliding on the homework, not applying myself in the kitchen, I need to make sure I don't do that.

Today, our instructor asked me to be the person to set up her demonstration station and yell out when a demo was about to happen.   I know what I did well and what I need to do differently next time.

This was good for me because the class as a whole didn't do very well in the organization department and the team I was going to be working with in particular.  We didn't clean as we went along or work neatly so there was no room for anything.  Things were done out of order so eggplant sat around and oxidized before we were ready to bread and pan fry them.  It took forever to do dishes and clean up and by the time we were done chef was pissed.

We stayed an extra twenty minutes past the twenty minutes we went over to finish the clean up.  Then I went over to career services to ask the counselor for clarification.  Turns out that as a culinary student, it's a *maybe* that I could do my externship at a bakery.

When I heard this my hormones, which are being wacky right now, kicked in and I started to cry.  This embarrassed me to no end.  Great.  Once I got calmed down and I was able to discuss how I could turn it from a maybe to a yes.

I'll need to send in a quick paragraph stating why I wanted to extern at this particular bakery and why I think it would be a good fit for me.  I can do that easily.

I also have the task ahead of getting my resume and cover letter into shape.  I've been at home for ten years, I'm going to need a LOT of help.  Luckily, there's the career counselor who's job it is to do that.  she won't do it FOR me, I'll need to bring one in, get feedback and make changes before meeting with her again.

And all of this scares me to death.  It'd be so much easier to go back to Barnes and Noble and schelp books for the rest of my life.

And if it's scary it's probably what I need to do.......

Amanda's beauty tip of the day:  If you are suddenly in a situation where you are sweating more than usual, be sure to wash your face at least once more a day.